Women’s Running 10km Race Series – A new Challenge

I recorded my first vlog the other day. It did not go to plan. I will be posting it on YouTube in the next few days, but for now I’m going to share what I was talking about on here, a platform I am much more comfortable with!

So why don’t you grab a cuppa and I’ll fill you in…

Last week I received the wonderful news that for the next few months I will be representing Womens Running magazine as one of their ambassadors. Amazing! I was majorly excited, I was feeling super confident, my ego took over for some strange reason and I remember thinking wow this will be a piece of cake.

I ran the Great Manchester Run back in May, and although I absolutely loved taking part, I was extremely disappointed in my own performance at the race and applied for this opportunity with Womens Running to give me a second chance to redeem myself.

The Manchester Womens Running 10km run is in September and as one of their ambassadors I will be keeping them updated on my training progress and thoughts, in the hope we can encourage more people to get into running.

The weekend flew by. No training.

The week flew by. Still no training.

After the realisation of how unprepared I am, how overly confident I had acted and a few other external factors thrown in, well, on Friday night I somehow fell into this negative state of meltdown. A full on crazy sobbing emotional and physical breakdown (my poor poor husband).

Ultimately this resulted in another wasted weekend and Monday morning, after a number of motivational pep talks from my other half, I woke up, took a long hard look at myself in the mirror and thought – I seriously need to get a grip.

So I did.

I reminded myself why I signed up to do this in the first place:

1 – I need to get fit.

It’s not really about how I look, it’s about how I feel. I’m past 30 and I spend so much of my time sat at a computer so I know it’s more important than ever to start taking care of myself. My fitbit stats last week were absolutely SHOCKING! I know if I don’t get into some sort of routine now, I never will.

2 – I need to conquer this challenge

I started the blog as a way to prove that I could still travel, still go out and discover new things, new places, new cities whilst holding down a full time job. Now I need to take it to the next level and prove I can do the travelling, work full time, keep up the blog, freelance AND still look after myself.

3 – To encourage others to run

I’m probably being very stereotypical here, but in the Indian community – sport is not a big thing – thankfully that’s changing, but truth be told most of my Indian/Pakistani family and friends don’t take part in any regular exercise- especially the women. I looked at many, many lists of ‘top fitness bloggers’ and not one of them featured a blogger of Indian heritage. So I wanted to do this to stress the importance of exercise in our community – as high cholesterol. diabetes and heart disease is a big issue that can be tackled through a healthy lifestyle.

and lastly…

I love running

I love that anyone can do it anytime, anywhere. It’s got me through some hard times in the past and finishing any run has always given me a great feeling of achievement.

On Monday I got ready for work. I Powered through the day. I wrote a MASSIVE hit list of things to do. Created a work schedule. A training schedule. Recorded my first video. Packed my gym bag. Celebrated my wedding anniversary and went to bed feeling like my old self.

We all have our off days, sometimes its a few days where we don’t think we can do something, don’t feel like we’re good enough and stress and fatigue can make everything look dark.

You just need to remember you’re never alone, you’re not the only one and sadness isn’t always a bad thing as the very wise philosopher Francis Bacon reminds us – “in order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present”